The Doctor Takes a Wife (Columbia, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I ran Charles and I an item from one of the two four-film sets I’d bought of Columbia Screwball Classics, so we had the unusual experience of watching a classic-era film from a commercial DVD rather than a home-recorded one or an archive.com download. The film was The Doctor Takes a Wife, made in 1940 and directed by Alexander Hall from a script by George Seaton and Ken Englund based on a story by Aleen Leslie. I hadn’t realized that in some ways The Doctor Takes a Wife was the classic-era version of the film Charles and I had watched the night before, Life as We Know It, though in this case instead of a baby that forces the two leads to live together and pretend to be married it’s a misunderstanding that turns into a publicity stunt. June Cameron (Loretta Young) is a feminist author who’s just published a best-selling book called Spinsters Aren’t Spinach about the wonderful, fulfilling and unencumbered lives women can have living alone. She’s stranded in Greenwich, Connecticut and has no way to get back to New York City for an emergency meeting with her publisher and boyfriend, John Pierce (Reginald Gardner, only mildly less prissy than usual), when she essentially commandeers the car of Dr. Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland), who has an M.D. but is stuck as an instructor at a college where he’s hoping to get a full professorship so he can afford to marry his girlfriend, Marilyn Thomas (Gail Patrick).

By chance (or scriptorial fiat) they stop in front of a quickie wedding chapel and the justice of the peace officiating there hires a boy to slap a “Just Married” sign on the car of the chapel’s latest (presumably) happy couple. Only of course the kid sticks the sign on Dr. Sterling’s car, and before they get to New York the grapevine spreads the word that the Great Apostle of Single Femaledom has tied the knot after all -- one woman recognizes Joan Cameron riding in a car with a “Just Married” sign and says, “Traitor!” Then John Pierce has an idea: since everyone, including the media, think June and Dr. Sterling are married -- which, among other things, has given the good doctor the promotion to full professorship he’s long wanted because the dean of his school (Paul McAllister) believes only married men have the stability for that position -- he’ll have them live together and pose as married so June can write a follow-up book on the joys of matrimony, whereupon after she finishes the book she can go to Reno for six weeks for an equally sham divorce. Only the inevitable (at least in a Hollywood movie) happens and the two hatebirds decide by the end of the film that they really love each other and get married for real -- they’re under the gun of a Morning Express reporter who’s found out they never were married and demands they produce a marriage license by midnight that night or he’ll expose them, but by the end of the film it’s chear they’re going to stay for real.

The sensibility of George Seaton, who in 1946 wrote and directed one of the most openly feminist films in classic Hollywood, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (in which Betty Grable plays a typist who builds a secretarial business and ends up with a man as her professional and personal partner instead of having to give up her career for him as most career women in classic Hollywood had to do -- especially in 1946, when the women who’d taken on men’s jobs during World War II were being told they had to give them up so the men could get their jobs back after the war and maintain their fragile hold on dignity and self-esteem), is all over the script here, and there are audacious scenes like the early one in which Dr. Sterling insists on being paid half the costs of their trip from Connecticut to New York and won’t leave June’s apartment until he feels sufficiently compensated. His idea of sufficient compensation is to grab a bottle of Scotch from June’s liquor cabinet and down about three-fourths of it, and while 1940 audiences probably read this as just another comic drunk scene, today it looks like Ray Milland warming up to play the decidedly non-comic drunk Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, the film that broke him out of the pretty-boy ghetto and won him the Academy Award.

There are also some delightful performances by the supporting cast, including Edmund Gwenn as Dr. Sterling’s father; Frank Sully and Gordon Jones as a couple of college football players who give John Pierce a flying tackle when they think he’s hitting on their beloved professor’s wife (they love him because he gave them a passing grade they didn’t deserve and thereby preserved their eligibility); and a quartet of singing telegram deliverers, one of whom I think was Elisha Cook, Jr. (Cook was just another milquetoast comic-relief player -- though he’s superb in the standout role of the campus radical in the 1936 musical Pigskin Parade -- until John Huston gave him his career-transforming role as the gulsen Wilmer Cook in the 1941 Maltese Falcon.) At times I wondered whether The Doctor Takes a Wife might have been better with a stronger, more openly “feminist” woman in the female lead -- someone like Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck -- but on reflection I decided they might have been too overbearing and Young’s softer approach might have been better (just as the first time I sw Warners’ 1937 biopic of Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, I wished they’d got Hepburn instead of Kay Francis to play her -- but on a later viewing I decided Francis’s softer but equally implacable determination to make her feminist points probably worked better than Hepburn’s flaring anger would have).

Some of Charles’ and my most fascinating movie nights have been these rare opportunities to compare a classic and modern approach to a similar story premise, and this time they pretty much came about even; I’m glad that the Production Code is over and moviemakers have more freedom to depict sexual relationships honestly and to have their characters swear, but I also appreciate the imagination the Code enforced on filmmakers -- even though it had its limits: there’s a lot of sniggering about Ray Milland being in Loretta Young’s apartment without being married to her, and the writers even borrowed the Bringing Up Baby gimmick of having someone (in this case, John Pierce) hide Dr. Sterling’s pants so he can’t leave. The Doctor Takes a Wife is, like Life as We Know It, not a great movie but a fun one -- though one can’t imagine a modern-day remake without a lot of tweaking of the moral attitudes: today a woman writing a book about the joys of singlehood wouldn’t have to pretend that she wasn’t having a sex life, and the plot would probably be about how a misunderstanding led people to believe she had actually married her latest boy-toy!